In this article we will discuss:
- An in-depth look at Bright Data’s Residential Proxy Network
- Residential Proxy Network advantages
- How to leverage Residential for price comparison, and digital commerce
An in-depth look at Bright Data’s Residential Proxy Network
Bright Data’s Residential Network is based on a global community of peers who choose to opt their devices into our network. This is what we call ‘peer-to-peer informational access’ which includes four participants as you can see in the following diagram:
- Participant #1: App developers – Install Bright Data’s SDK on their program enabling them to create an additional stream of passive income depending on the quantity of users that choose to opt-in.
- Participant #2: Device owners – Who decide to opt-in, and share their resources with businesses are compensated with a ‘freemium’ membership, an ad-free app experience or any other way app owners choose to incentivise device owners to opt-in. Note: Device owners always have the right to opt-out at any point in time.
- Participant #3: Bright Data / SDK – We have the privilege of facilitating the technology and networks which serve as a platform for businesses to perform data collection.
- Participant #4: Digital businesses – [This one includes both businesses who collect data using our networks as well as those that do not.] The Residential peer-to-peer network enables businesses to level the playing field and create a truly free market digital economy. So for example if a company collects competitive pricing data this is good for all businesses (and consumers) as it creates transparency-driven competition.
The previous diagram was meant to illustrate a clear ‘close up’ on the reciprocity of the Residential Network. This diagram is a more zoomed out visualization of Residential’s architecture, and build:
Residential Proxy Network advantages
Residential is a network with unique IPs located in every country and city in the world giving you access to one of the most sophisticated informational access systems currently available. Here are Residential’s main advantages:
- One of the biggest, hands down advantages of Residential is the fact that it enables you to view content from a real local user’s perspective. For example, This may include a marketing agency verifying that their client’s Rio de Janeiro-based target audience is being served ads in Portuguese alongside the correct visuals, as well as verifying that the Call To Action (CTA) link is clickable, and leading users to the correct campaign landing page.
- The other big upside is the fact that you have massive flexibility as far as scalability is concerned (up or down). This is what we call ‘the power of unlimited concurrent requests’. What this essentially means is that since you are routing traffic through individual peer devices you can send as many (or as few) data requests as you like simultaneously without compromising on ‘collection speeds’ or ‘success rates’.
How to leverage Residential for price comparison, and digital commerce
Residential is an especially effective tool when approaching use cases that entail:
- Brand protection – For example routing traffic through local user IPs in order to discover trademark squatting infringements, and copyright infringements/piracy so that your legal team can take further necessary actions.
- Digital advertising – Monitoring international campaigns with very specific GEO-targeting to ensure that language, and phrasing is spot-on as well as performing back/affiliate link verification.
- Travel intelligence – Including collecting things like competitor bundle/special offers as well as tracking consumer sentiment and search habits regarding trending destinations, and travel experiences.
- eCommerce – Digital retail businesses as well as vendor-facing dashboards utilize Residential to collect customer product reviews, competitor inventory data, as well as performing real-time price comparison on specific products.
Here is a concrete example of how price comparison can be implemented
A good example of this is a Canadian eCommerce vendor that sells some of its products in the US. For argument’s sake let’s say that they have a large customer base in Nebraska as well as a fully developed warehousing, and distribution center. They are trying to manage their Nebraskan operations from Canada but each time they try to access their American vendor accounts they experience errors such as not being able to price products and inflated shipping costs from their office’s geographic location.
With the help of Bright Data’s Residential Network, they leverage real consumer devices located in Nebraska in order to manage their accounts. Additionally, they collect local vendor pricing so that their algorithms can update their site-native pricing scheme in real-time, based on the competition. Here is a really neat visualization of this case scenario:
The bottom line
Residential proxies help companies leverage an extensive/global peer-to-peer network for more accurate and efficient results. It enables companies to increase their number of concurrent requests while helping drive success rates upwards and serving accurate consumer-side datasets.
